A number of years ago I was visiting a family in Solon and they confided in me that they felt that their basement was haunted. They complained about hearing sounds of broken glass and other frightening and strange occurrences down there. Usually I read stories like this in "UFO and Paranormal" stories, but they seemed like normal wholesome people, so we brainstormed about some Torah solutions to their dilemma, and went with the mezuzah approach. The family swore that the "ghosts" disappeared after kosher mezuzahs were affixed to their home.
Recently, I was at a home in Twinsburg, and I was examining a baby after his bris. The changing table was in the den right off the kitchen. Suddenly a bottle slid off the counter, seemingly all by itself. I asked the parents, "Who did that?" They looked at each other, and looked at me, and said "Ella did that."
"Ella who?" I asked.
They explained that the previous homeowner was a woman named Ella. She died in the kitchen. Spooky things were always happening in the kitchen in the spot where she died. They had both gotten so used to it, that they were nonchalant about it by now.
The Talmud teaches us that back in the day when there was a Holy Temple in Jerusalem, prophecy, clairvoyance, and other supernatural, spiritual phenomena existed in the world, and the concepts of ghosts, demons, and haunted homes also were a reality. There is a deep, mystical reason for this: this reflects the Torah concept that there always must be an equal, spiritual balance, of the forces of "light" and the forces of "darkness." This is in order to be even and to offer us an equal free-will balance in the world. In fact, the Talmud tells us a story about a seven-headed demon that was terrorizing the students of a prominent Talmudic academy, and recounts how the Rabbis dealt with the problem!
Now that we live in a "non-prophet" :) society, these concepts don't necessarily exist anymore today. What are your feelings about these two unrelated stories? Imagination, fiction, coincidence? Do you believe in ghosts and haunted houses? How would you have responded?
